Isorhythmos: Music for Percussion & Keyboards
Date Sun 28 July, 8.00pm
Venue Powerhouse Theatre
Costs $18 Full / $12 Conc.
Vincent PLUSH - The Summoning of the Sun [1999]. For antiphonal
percussion.
Peter GENA - Beethoven in Soho [1980]. For two amplified grand
pianos, in unison, and electric bass guitar.
William DUCKWORTH - Gathering Together [1992] and Revolution
[1993]. For two keyboards and percussion.
Intermission during which some ‘musique d’ameublement’
will be played :
Erik SATIE - Pieces froides [1897] and Nouvelles pieces
froides [1907]. For solo piano.
John CAGE - Living Room Music [1940]. For a quartet of percussionist-speakers.
Kelly TRENCH - Dance Party [2002].
For percussionists, voices and audience
Following the performance, please join us in the SpinBar for a post-concert
Latin turntable-party.
Performers
Isorhythmos: David Montgomery leader, Andrew Knox, lounge lizard,
John Parker, Leah Scholes.
With: Jenni Flemming and Kylie Davidson, keyboards, Robert Davidson,
electric bass guitar, DJTamara, Sound Manipulation.
And: Stephen Wittington, solo piano, playing the Saties.
The Summoning of the Sun [1999]
Vincent PLUSH [b.1950, Adelaide, South Australia]
For percussion ensemble
This short work is the sixth section of a much larger composition,
Northern Lights, a community composition written for the city
of Mackay, in central Queensland, as part of the Queensland Biennial
Festival of Music in 1999.
At the time, I had been back in Australia for only a few months,
after an absence of almost 18 years in the USA. The last three years
of that time I had lived in Seattle and had grown to love its rugged
landscapes, its tolerance of multicultural diversity, its unrelenting
rain and feeling of being close to the earth. Part of this may have
been due to the fact that I lived quite close to a Native American
ceremonial site at Discovery Park, high above the banks of the Puget
Sound. On several occasions, I caught various rituals and performances
there. One morning, at dawn, I experienced the welcoming of the Sun,
a ritual traditionally enacted at the end of the long gray winter
in the Pacific Northwest.
A legion of drummers, each with two drums, surrounded the site, and
began to pound out a constant throbbing rhythm, broken by odd accents.
Slowly, as the volume and intensity rose, those accents came coming
closer together to form a kind of terrace of contracting riccochet-steps.
The sound of this thunderous 'drumming circle' began to enfold and
spiral around the site, as the drumming grew to a frenzy to scare
away the last vestiges of a tired and ragged winter.
The Summoning of the Sun , lifted directly from a single page
of this score, can be performed by any number of drummers, surrounding
an audience, over any duration of time. Try to listen 'inside' the
music, to catch the accents as they contract and merge together to
create other acoustic patterns within the resonance of the performing
space. VPP
Beethoven in SoHo [1980]
Peter GENA [b.1946, Chicago, Illinois]
For two unison amplified pianos and electric bass guitar
If he were alive today, Beethoven would have a loft in lower Manhattan
rather than a high-rise apartment uptown on Riverside Drive or West
End Avenue.
An artist learns from history whether his or her work evolves from
tradition, or deviates from it. The academician usually creates a
model through theoretical analysis and imitates style, or safely draws
from experimental ideas and interprets them into a style, thus establishing
an ‘experimental tradition.’ The experimental artist, however,
is aware that the analysis of art has little to do with the act of
creating art. That is, we cannot successfully incorporate new ideas
into our work unless these ideas are generated out of our own process.
We observe how composers have dealt with compositional issues; we
are not merely ‘lusting in our hearts for older music.’
New ideas are born out of either our knowledge or our ignorance of
everything that has happened. [To do what he did, Satie must have
known nothing. . . or everything.] In Beethoven in SoHo, I
steal all of the surface material from his Piano Sonata, Op. 54.
I tried to fuse my ongoing interest in sound-continuum with the gradual
unfolding of melodic and harmonic events that exist inherently in
the order of repeated fragments. Hence, while the original material
approaches abstraction, the perception of form emanates as an issue
of process. PG
Gathering Together [1992] and Revolution [1993]
William DUCKWORTH [b.1943, North Carolina]
For keyboards and percussion
This is a two-part work in 93 sections, scored for mallet percussion
instruments, drums and keyboards. The idea for the piece came from
almost simultaneous commissions from the Ars Ludi ensemble in Rome
and Essential Music in New York: two groups with not only a similar
instrumentation, but a compatible philosophy as well.
Gathering Together, written for Ars Ludi, is scored for two
synthesizer/electronic keyboards and two mallet percussionists. In
62 sections in an ABCDE form, it uses variations on John Cage's speech
rhythms from The Future of Music : Credo [1937] to generate
most of the basic rhythms of the work. Composed over June and July
1992, it was premiered by Ars Ludi in Rome in September that year.
Revolution was written for Essential Music in January 1993.
It is scored for two grand pianos, amplified and in unison, and four
percussionists playing unpitched instruments, mainly drums. Its 31
sections form an ABCBA pattern. The basic rhythms are developed around
Cage's musical rhythms from Credo in US [1942], overlapped
with slowly unfolding variations on rhythms taken from a variety of
styles of currently popular music.
From the beginning, Gathering Together/Revolution
was conceived as one large composition comprising two independent
pieces, and there are a number of connections between the two works.
The most obvious is the timbral scheme. This takes the keyboards from
marimba and vibraphone sounds, through synthesizer sounds to, finally
in Revolution, acoustic piano sounds. Simultaneously, the percussion
explore several categories of pitched mallet sounds, before moving
to unpitched drumming, then to non-Western percussion, and finally
to the sounds of "found" instruments, before returning to
drums at the close. The result is a sonic sweep through the two works
from highly synthesized to acoustic piano sounds in the keyboards,
and mallet to unpitched "found" sounds in the percussion.
WD
Pieces froides [1897] and Nouvelles pieces froides [1907]
During intermission, some Musique d’ameublement [“Furniture
music”] by …
Erik SATIE [1866-1925]
Pieces froides [1897]
Airs a faire fuir
Danses de travers
Nouvelles pieces froides [1907?]
I. Sur un mur
II. Sur un arbre
III. Sun un pont
Approximately ten years separate these two sets of pieces, sharing
the same title of “Cold Pieces”. Each contains Satie’s
‘holy trinity’ of three miniatures, related in many ways,
but thrown off-balance in typically original ways.
The first set of pieces divides in two – Tunes to Make You
Run Away and Crooked Dances. Like the earlier Gymnopedies
[1888], they are the same piece, viewed, like a Cubist sculpture,
from different angles. The second of the three Airs is a setting of
the English folksong, The Keel-Row, also used by Debussy!
Similarly, the first two pieces of the Nouvelles are actually
the same piece composed twice over. In each, the same eight-bar theme
is stated three times but with different harmonies. The textures are
different: the block chords of On a Wall are smoothed into
the arpeggios of On a Tree. The third piece, On a Bridge,
bears little resemblance to its predecessors and is a demonstration
of the invertible counterpoint Satie studied at the Schola Cantorum.
It ends with a whole-tone passage, either an hommage or coup at Debussy!
Living Room Music [1939-40]
John CAGE [1912-1992]
For four percussionist – speakers
Echoing Satie’s “furniture music”, this short, six
minute work uses “found object instruments" that might be
located in a living room: furniture, magazines, bottles and glasses.
Writing in Wireless Imagination [1992] Geoffrey Kahn sees its origins
in “the domestic sphere, now vacated by the petit-bourgeois piano,
presented as a site for musical production rather than mere reception".
Completed in 1940, Living Room Music is a suite in
four movements and belongs to that period of Cage’s work where
structure was still important to him. The text of the spoken section
is by Gertrude Stein.
Dance Party
Dr Kelly Trench has not provided an annotation for her new Dance
Party. Quixotically, she has suggested that “Nature should be
left to take Her course….”
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